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Winning union approval for even greater flexibility was easier in Leipzig. In part, that's because other German automakers, particularly Volkswagen, were threatening to move some of their production outside Germany altogether because of high costs. In the end, the union agreed to extend working hours without extra pay. That has been a boon to the whole industry--and the German economy. Reithofer acknowledges that the wage restraint "has been a fundamental contribution to making Germany competitive again...
...gained particular concessions from its workers because Leipzig is in formerly communist eastern Germany, where unemployment has been about double the western German level and wages have lagged. Under the negotiated agreement, BMW doesn't pay higher rates for Saturday work in Leipzig, and employees put in on average two more hours a week than in western German BMW plants. Moreover, about half the 5,000 workers in Leipzig are not on BMW's staff; they either work for suppliers such as Faurecia or are so-called lease workers employed by specialized agencies and used by BMW when needed. That...
Union representatives generally rate BMW a good employer, and they characterize overall relations with management as good. The feeling is mutual. "German law is better than its reputation, and so are the unions," says Leipzig plant director Peter Claussen. Still, the use of so many lease workers in Leipzig is a sore point. Jens Köhler, the workers' main representative in Leipzig, reckons that lease workers receive about two-thirds the monthly pay and fewer benefits than colleagues who are BMW staffers. Calculated on an annual basis, once Christmas bonuses and profit sharing are included, lease workers are paid only...
Directors like to think of themselves as adventurers: taking big-budget risks, leading actors and technicians into the artistic unknown, often shooting in faraway locations. But no filmmaker can match Werner Herzog for inspiring recklessness. The German director's movie sojourns take him not just to remote corners of Peru, Alaska and Thailand but also to the uncharted interior of man's highest, most lunatic dreams. In a 46-year career of great fiction films (Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Heart of Glass; Nosferatu; Fitzcarraldo) and in a string of amazing, hallucinatory documentaries (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner...
Bale isn't nuts like Kinski, but he has the insane dedication Herzog asks of his performers; he lost 55 lbs. for his role in Rescue Dawn. The movie is a remake, in a way, of Herzog's 1997 documentary Little Dieter Loves to Fly, about a German boy, Dieter Dengler, whose home in the Black Forest was bombed by U.S. planes; he caught a glimpse of the pilot, "like a vision ... like an imaginary being," and decided that he wanted to fly--a theme in many Herzog docs. Dengler went to the U.S., joined the Navy and was shot...